Date: September 3rd, 2012

Title: Support Your Local Astronomical Society

Podcaster: West Didsbury Astronomical Society

Organization: West Didsbury Astronomical Society

Links: www.wdas2.com : twitter: @wdas2

Description: West Didsbury Astronomical Society Chairman Phil, and Committee Members Carolyn, Cos, Diane, Jason, Kevin, Louise and Susie talk to Marie about why they enjoy being part of the group, and why we think you should join your local astronomical society!

Bio: West Didsbury Astronomical Society is based in South Manchester, UK. It was founded in 2001, and meets on the second Monday of each month throughout the year (apart from August).

Today’s Sponsor: This episode of 365 days of Astronomy is sponsored by iTelescope.net – Expanding your horizons in astronomy today. The premier on-demand telescope network, at dark sky sites in Spain, New Mexico and Siding Spring, Australia.

Transcript:

Welcome to this 365 Days of Astronomy podcast – Support Your Local Astronomical Society.  My name’s Marie O’Sullivan and I joined West Didsbury Astronomical Society as my New Year’s Resolution for the year 2011.

In this conversation, you’ll hear Chairman Phil, and Committee Members Carolyn, Cos, Diane, Jason, Kevin, Louise and Susie talking about why they enjoy being part of the group.  We gathered, as we often do, in Louise’s kitchen, with tea and homemade cake, so that I could quiz them about their involvement with the Astronomical Society.  See if you can spot the embarrassing moment when I ask a question just after the person has taken a large mouthful of cake!

Marie: Phil, perhaps you could start by explaining to us how the society came to be formed.

Phil: The society had its inaugural meeting in May 2001, which was resulting from a group of students who studied for a GCSE in astronomy at the City College of Manchester.

Louise: We started on a stargazing course, that’s what it was all about, and the reason that we’ve kind of stayed together if you like is because it was 1999 when it was the year of the solar eclipse in – Devon? – and it was because of that and the excitement around that it fired peoples’ imagination and I think that was one of the things that, in the whole of the country, ignited the interest in astronomy.

Susie: You met us on the canal bank, didn’t you?

Phil: Unknowingly, yes

Susie: Yes unknowingly you met us while we were actually trying to observe Venus, was it? You were a little tipsy, cycling along the canal and you bumped into us lot trying to look at Venus through a telescope and you came across and asked us what we were doing.

Phil: And I never knew then that I would end up ten, eleven years later sat around this table talking about a decade of West Didsbury Astronomical Society.

Marie: So what does a typical meeting look like?

Phil: The meetings are always held on the second Monday of the month.  They run for a couple of hours –starting at 7 o’clock then run through till 9 o’clock.  Well most meetings we invite a speaker, an astronomer, locally based, to talk to us on the subject of their interest.  And it’s quite remarkable that we’ve been going for 10 years , 10 speakers a year … 100 speakers we’ve found in the North West, academics, eminent astronomers who give freely and willingly of their time and attend our astronomy society meetings.  So the meetings are predominantly a lecture by an astronomer, very much an opportunity for us as a small group of enthusiastic local astronomers, scientists, people just with a passing interest or developing interest in astronomy to hear what is going on.  And that’s the formality of the meeting, we try and start the meeting with one of our members talking about something at perhaps a slightly simpler level – observing opportunities in the sky in the forthcoming month or forthcoming months, and we do look forward as the evening wears on and 9 o’clock approaches to closing the meeting up and getting down to the pub, which is where the meeting continues, and often the speaker comes and joins us and we have the opportunity to discuss within a slightly less formal environment our interest in his subject and I think most people are prepared to ask questions which may be intelligent, maybe slightly off-the-wall, maybe very much misinformed but the speakers have always been very gracious in their answering and very interesting.

Marie: Let’s see then, what have been some of the highlights in the speakers – who have you had or what topics have you had that have been particularly interesting?

Kevin: I think the best one for me was Ian Morison, which was the second one I ever attended, and we got into quite a lively debate with him about matter popping into existence and then disappearing without interacting with the world and it was quite amazing to think you’ve got this world-renowned scientist in my back garden essentially talking to me about some very specific part of astrophysics, it was absolutely awesome!  And that’s one of the things I like about the society.

Marie: Carolyn I know you’re responsible for bringing the speakers together and setting the programme, so is it as easy as Phil made it sound to get people to fill the slots for us?

Carolyn: Well I was very lucky because I used to attend some of the extra-mural university courses before I left work and got very friendly with the organiser.  And when I retired and said I was going to be given a telescope for my retirement present and was looking for an astronomical society she told me about West Didsbury Astronomical Society and was kind enough to give me a long list of speakers that had spoken on university courses and I think that kept us going for a couple of years.

Kevin: I think it’s quite phenomenal having Jodrell Bank on our doorstep as well, as well as the leading university in certain areas of astrophysics – specifically radio astronomy – in Manchester University, and we tie in with those and we’ve been to a couple of public events where we’ve gone and taken the telescopes down and shown the public a good time.

Cos: I can’t resist saying or remembering now, another highlight for me was seeing pictures – during a talk on this super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy – of stars moving around where the black hole was, and my jaw just dropped at seeing that, I didn’t expect, and that’s what you get on a Monday night.

Susie: It is the unexpected things you learn – you turn up for a meeting, often tired on a Monday night; you always learn something that you think “My word, I would never have thought that’s even possible” or even “That’s an idea that would never have even occurred to me” and it’s that mind-expanding part of what the speakers tell us.

Marie: Jason, you do a little bit at the beginning of every month to just tell us what’s in the sky and what to look up for if we have a cloud-free night – how did you get interested in that kind of thing?

Jason: I think it must have been about the time of Hale-Bopp and actually seeing the comet just floating in the sky every night and I remember getting out of the car and just looking up at the sky and it was probably the first time I’d ever done it, you know, it was wonderful, and we’d go to all these meetings and hear people talking about these things but it’s so nice to go out and actually see them as well.  And it’s just been wonderful over the years.  Of course where we are in Manchester you don’t really see a great deal of the sky but even so you still get the events and the transits and things like that and it’s remarkable actually being able to see them.

Marie: Diane, like me I think you’re one of the newer members of the society, so what was it that brought you in in the first place?

Diane: The first thing that happened was, I was invited along for a particular talk by somebody I knew who came along already, and so I came along thinking “Am I just going to sit there for an hour and then go home not having communicated with anybody else?” But, I found that everybody was very friendly!  And certainly I’d only been to the meetings 3 or 4 times before our wonderful chair here was saying “Would you like to be on the committee?” – it was that sort of atmosphere!

Marie: Louise, ….. [laughter]… I’m so sorry! We’re rolling …  By contrast, you were one of the earlier members of the society so what is it that’s kept you coming back all the time? What do you get from the group?

Louise:  I’m a bit like Susie in the sense that, sometimes I come along and I learn something that had never even occurred to me even existed.  From each meeting I learn just a tiny, tiny little bit and it kind of all fits together with the information that we learned on our GCSE course and stargazing course and people at work know that I’m interested in astronomy and they used to think that I was a bit of a geek but far from it because I don’t really understand all the physics behind it and now, of course it’s quite cool – thank you Mr Brian Cox; or Professor Brian Cox – it’s quite cool to be into astronomy.

Cos: I’m reminded also that in addition to the speakers that we have, we have equipment to loan out, and I was able to borrow for a while this fantastic telescope that you can actually point at the sun, called a corona scope, and I had it for a couple of months and I showed it to my neighbours, I took it to work and showed colleagues and school kids where I was working, and to see these little prominences myself has changed the way the sun does appear to me now, and whenever we hear that these prominences might cause a flare that might knock out communications around our globe I can picture that.

Louise: I had a similar experience when we first looked down a telescope.  We’ve all seen these fantastic pictures, arty pictures, of downloaded photographs and they just look beautiful and colourful, we’ve seen them in the magazines, but when I actually looked down the telescope the first time, I think the first think that I looked at was the Pleiades.  And I couldn’t believe it, because it was like diamonds sparkling down the telescope and then when I looked up in the sky I thought “Gosh those little dots there really look like this” and that was just a bog-standard telescope but absolutely mind-blowing as well.

Susie: It’s having that shared enthusiasm, isn’t it? Often when you’re out with other people who aren’t quite as interested you’re like “Wow there’s Jupiter and there’s Mars” and they just go “Oh yeah” but when you’re with the group it’s like “Oh yeah look at that!” and we’ll get the telescopes out and we’ll do this and it’s that enthusiasm, that shared enthusiasm.

Jason: It’s sort of quite heart-warming as well; we went up to Oldham and we had a fabulous time and we set all the telescopes up and we were not expecting anything good at all, we thought for a start it’s going to cloud …

Phil: This was an outreach evening, wasn’t it?

Jason:  Yes it was, and we had so many people turn up, it was extraordinary and it was fabulously clear and you could see Jupiter so well and Saturn’s rings.  And we had little kids there: I remember one running round the front of the telescope to see if he could see it hanging there in front of the telescope because Saturn was exquisite with its rings and its moons and everything.  And of course Hardraw – we haven’t mentioned that!  We go on our annual trip up to a relatively dark sky site and, alright if it’s raining we probably end up in the pub, but we have a wonderful time, and it’s a great opportunity to see some things that we wouldn’t usually see from where we are.

Diane: That amazed me the first time I went to Hardraw – to actually see how many stars there are once you get away from the city lights.  You can’t even see the constellations because there are so many background stars; it’s not a case of you can just pick out the brighter ones.

Louise: That is an advantage of stargazing in the city is that you tend to only see the brighter stars and I do remember saying to somebody, actually, it’s easier to stargaze quite often in the city because you can see the constellations.  When you go out to a dark site it’s hard to really pick them out!

Marie:  If there are people listening now and they’re thinking “Oh, I’d quite like to get involved but I’m just not quite sure” what would you say to them?  What would be your words of advice?

Louise & Susie: Come along! Come and see us!  Don’t be afraid! Try us out! We don’t bite!  Try us out, or a local astronomy group – try them out.
If you’re near South Manchester, whether permanently, or just passing through, we’d love to see you at our next meeting, which is all about the Higgs Boson, and which is on Monday 10th September.   Check our website for details of other speakers– www.wdas2.com – where you’ll also find the complete, unedited version of this discussion.  If you’re not in striking distance, and don’t already belong to a group – then we definitely recommend you join in with and support your local astronomical society.  We wish you all clear skies!

End of podcast:

365 Days of Astronomy
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